Tuesday, May 09, 2017

I have to admit, American Conservative did successfully draw my attention to their article on politics and nerd culture with this tweet:

AmericanConservative‏Verified account @amconmag @voxday we may be cucks but here's a piece you might find pretty interesting:

The piece struck me as about two decades out of date. Science fiction readers may have once skewed more to the right than fantasy readers, but in these latter, SJW-ridden days, they are just as heavily left-leaning, if not more so:

One explanation is that progressives tend to gravitate toward fantasy because of the similarities between the idealism found throughout much of the genre and the progressive notion of progress and the perfectibility of humanity. George R.R. Martin sums up the meaning of fantasy in this sense very nicely on his blog, noting that fantasy is “written in the language of dreams”:

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

Fantasy gives us wonderful visions, ones that drew me into the genre as a kid, but alas, ones that do not necessarily reflect the realities of human nature. George R.R. Martin knows this perhaps better than any fantasy author, for his is a work on politics and power.

Another convincing explanation for the lack of conservatism in the genre is found on the popular fantasy and science-fiction website Tor.com, where Liz Bourke argues:

If epic fantasy is second-world fantasy that shapes its arc in the form of a grand mythic quest (or several), that plays with tropes such as the return or re-establishment (or sometimes the purification) of a monarch, then it’s, by nature, conservative in structure, and by habit conservative in the political institutions it portrays. But it’s not necessarily conservative in its attitudes towards power, relationships, and orientation towards divinity.

It is an interesting question, but neither of these explanations are convincing or correct. The reason SF/F skews heavily left is actually very easy to understand. First, it is inordinately consumed by fat women and gamma males, or to put it another way, social losers seeking escape from the reality that they find painful. Second, those fat women and gamma males have been in control of SF/F publishing for several decades, so the delta males who used to read and write SF/F have largely gravitated towards thrillers and mil-SF if they read and computer games if they don't.

" First, it is inordinately consumed by fat women and gamma males, or to put it another way, social losers seeking escape from the reality that they find painful"I don't think this is right, if for no other reason than it presupposes that publishers actually know what they are doing.Its the second bit really, It's run by women, who want authors and works that conform to their preferred narratives, some in an attempt to 'fix' the world, but mostly just because they cant fathom that people don't like what they like.

Not surprising since SF/F allows them to construct a world that adheres to their leftest prejudices, makes them heroes where in reality they could never be, and they are good at plotting and story manipulation they can have their leftist ideals triumph where in reality they fail every time.

Off the top of my head I cannot comprehend that the cucks at amcon could even grasp the concept of sexual hierarchy as you describe it. And I would guess if the cucks there would address the issue it would read as if it came from Salon or some other crazy click bait drive by leftard internet vehicle.

@2 Precisely. Fantasy is dominated by people who think they know what people ought to like. And warrior kings, beautiful princesses, and mages with knowledge beyond mortals are definitely NOT on the list of things people ought to like. Thus the decline and fall of mainstream fantasy publishing houses.

@6, Nah, just another case of "Did you know that until 1965 it was legal, lawful and socially acceptable to rape women? Because legally women were potatoes? Because of Christians? I didn't know that until I read it just yesterday!"

I don't know that I even after with the assessment that SF/F leans left at all. The publishing bureaucracy, certainly, but the actual genre? As far as I can tell, the lefty agenda never took root with the popular authors.

Fiction (SF or Fantasy or X, Y, and Z) is about exploring archetypes, i.e., pushing the boundaries of reality or simply compressing them (a lifetime, or some major epiphany or cusp) into a quickly digested vessel.

Reality is heroic. Reality is magical. If this clown (whose name is about as WASP as mine is Mandarin) can't see that, then frankly he's a f***ing moron.

SF/F went Left because it's 1) mass market and 2) herd-driven. That said, what is it?

Men with tits are the heroes.People with behavioral dysfunctions are feted.Theocratic totems are embraced.

The archetypes are (largely) still there, the cosmetics are changed to grovel at the feet of the Long Fad.

The problem with this is that we KNOW BETTER. Suspension of disbelief is already maximized in distilling a life, or an epoch or just a tumultuous weekend into a digestible story.

Substituting people who are NOT HEROIC for those who are simply renders the experience too artificial to enjoy.

PS: Game of Thrones (all 20 minutes I've watched of it) is just a less campy version of Dark Shadows (the soap, not the even more abominable movie.)

GoT is a soap opera (or Romance Novel) combined with a horror film. I sincerely believe that people who enjoy horror are rabbits whose amygdalas are so dead that getting a little spark when someone gets gutted and a necrophiliac has some fun is all they can do to feel alive, short of indulging in a little real-world murder and necrophilia themselves.

Different fiction for different folks. Quite frankly, examining the fiction/movie preferences of people informs me quite well where on the herding spectrum they fall.

People (as in school children) are getting visibly dumber each year that goes by. Readers of this blog probably have no idea just how rapidly is rising the percentage of utterly dysfunctional kids hitting 4th grade, and I entirely blame the pervasiveness of video entertainment (both movies/TV and games.)

You now have 10 year olds who try to use a game strategy manual as a basis for a book report. Kids who are ill-mannered and uncontrollable, but who can sit for hours, their arms, hands and eyes jerking spasmodically as they relive recent video-gaming adventures.

As the Western world transitions from reading physical books to full-video experiences (and soon-to-be VR), the mental structures once honed by reading & internal imagining are never developed.

My thesis is that if these structures are not developed by puberty, they (like language) cannot be developed at all, at least not to the level they could have been.

Mathematics education doesn't help engineers or computer scientists plug and chug in their occupations, it CHANNELS THEIR MINDS at a critical point in development. The same thing occurs with READING.

Modern life is a grand experiment in child development. From ubiquitous exposure to adult human sexuality, to "mental shortcuts" that make mathematics or imaginative entertainment into "press a button and watch," we are going to discover that the developing human mind was tinkered with at our civilization's peril.

THE WITCHER series is interesting. It's action-oriented fantasy with lots of monster-killing and swordplay, but also somewhat pozzed by the author's GRRRL POWWWAR!!! motifs.

Not anywhere near as badly pozzed as contemporary SFF written in English (being Polish, Sapkowski is way behind the shitlib curve), but enough to be jarring at times. Particularly when slender little girlies who don't possess magic somehow beat up hulking peasants.

Another problem the books have is modernism. Characters in a fantasy medieval setting should talk and act accordingly. Characters in The Witcher series tend to have superficial olden thymes sensibilities, but they're really modern-day people with a dash of antediluvian vocab. Particularly regarding sex and religion, where our heroes behave more like self-indulgent 20th c. baby boomers than they do people from an alternate Middle Ages.

It's not fatal to the story, but it does cheapen it. Tolkien, Wolfe, and Wright craft tales where the characters are natural results of, and make sense within their own imagined world. Verisimilitude is a difficult spell to cast in a setting that includes monsters and magic, and the illusion is easily broken when characters behave like Joss Whedon heroines transplanted to the dark ages.

"Fantasy gives us wonderful visions, ones that drew me into the genre as a kid, but alas, ones that do not necessarily reflect the realities of human nature. George R.R. Martin knows this perhaps better than any fantasy author, for his is a work on politics and power."

wreckage wrote:@2 Precisely. Fantasy is dominated by people who think they know what people ought to like. And warrior kings, beautiful princesses, and mages with knowledge beyond mortals are definitely NOT on the list of things people ought to like. Thus the decline and fall of mainstream fantasy publishing houses.

The Ought people are not as bad as the 'Do' people.I also know what people 'Ought' to like, But i know for a full certainty that's not what they do actually like.Those people who think they know what everyone likes, and cant fathom the contrary, they are actually worse.The first kind one can at least engage with, the second kind are just functionally braindead.

@2. DesillusioneradI don't think this is right, if for no other reason than it presupposes that publishers actually know what they are doing.

There's no such presupposition necessary. Gammas (and fat women, but I repeat myself) assume that they are the standard-bearer for taste and quality. Because Secret Kings.

So when they're in charge, they try to make everything match to their taste, which is sooooo superior, and the only people who really dig that taste are other gammas.

They're not like deltas, who can at least look at declining sales and think, "Wait, stories about genociding cishets don't sell. Perhaps we should change." Thus, the Gamma Gatekeeper purity spirals and double-downs into eventual oblivion.

wreckage - Dunno. I haven't read Elric, but from the plot summaries the similarities seem superficial.

Not that Geralt, as a broody wandering warrior in a world of might and magic, is original in any deeper sense. It was a well trodden trope long before 1984, when Joe Denver's LONE WOLF series got in on that action. Tho Roland of Gilead did it better.

Why does RapeRape have rape in GoT? Its for the ladies, of course. He wanted to appeal to a bigger fanbase than a medieval war would normally appeal so he added some stuff to appeal to women. How could he get them interested in his books? Look at what they read. He grabbed a Harlequin novel and said, "I can do that" and thus you have rape in GoT

The ring of truth is not here. Neither the quoted article or the commentary strike to the heart of the matter. I don't say this out of wishful thinking. I am not arguing SF/F isn't left leaning right now. The article itself reads like its speaking of the new wave movement, so VD's comments about it reading like it's two decades out of phase are sound in that respect. To put dare to put it more simply, the genre was converged and over taken by the prevailing winds of mass media culture. Our mass media culture is still left leaning. When or if that changes, so will the genre.

Really? I like fantasy, but the vision thing is BS. I just want to read a good adventure. Any "landscape", any "physics" will do. Ok, it must remain internally consistent, no "oh wait, here is a new spell that saves the day".

So, would visceral rage and vengefulness be a gamma response to being overshadowed by the greats of the genre?

Because I've been wondering for years why so many writers cannot get over their hatred and rebellion against Tolkien, Lewis, and so on, so much so as to allow their entire career to be shaped by it, thereby of course producing works that are slavishly imitative in the negative of Tolkien, Lewis, etc.

Gamma-tude is, from my limited scope for observation, the category most consistent and apparent. Is this another symptom?

@33. RabidRatelI am beginning to understand the case for eunuchs much better now.

The problem with making gammas into eunuchs, is that for some reason people listen to eunuchs. And missing their twig and berries won't make gammas any less delusional -- they weren't properly using them to begin with, after all.

Points for cleverness is mocking the cuck terms in their tweet. I hear this on tons of podcasts and see it in text. Cuck may have lost the political sting it initially had. People are now laughing about it all the time.

"Artists in general are also left-leaning because government support is easier to make a living from than the free market."

Plus, for writers, it takes a certain submissive, masochistic mindset to spend years begging agents and publishers to please think about reading their books before they eventually get one published. That's far more common on the left than the right (ok, excluding the cucks).

Fortunately, that no longer matters when anyone can publish their book on Amazon and other ebook retailers.

The reason SciFi skews left is because it has had a secular humanist basis for far too long.

Fantasy skews left now because Dungeons and Dragons was transgressive back in the day. Another aspect is simply that "conservatives" used to be Christians who often felt uneasy with topics including magic.

Points for cleverness is mocking the cuck terms in their tweet. I hear this on tons of podcasts and see it in text. Cuck may have lost the political sting it initially had. People are now laughing about it all the time.

It hasn't. And they're not laughing, they're pretending to be laughing. Because gamma.

The piece struck me as about two decades out of date. Science fiction readers may have once skewed more to the right than fantasy readers, but in these latter, SJW-ridden days, they are just as heavily left-leaning, if not more so:

Prime Example: The Expanse.

Hard science SF done completely wrong.

Corey would have had a much harder time writing this if Larry Niven hadn't been available to profoundly rip off.

He stole Niven's work and turned it into SJWs in space.

The Expanse looked promising but it's garbage in every way available to it.

Interesting, because I stopped reading SF/F except for the old classics for a long time - around 1995 to about 2015. Most of what was written after the mid-'90s was junk. So I switched to age-of-sail nautical fiction.

I didn't get back into SF/F until I discovered this site, which led me to some decent authors.

Fantasy can be redeemed, but it must be done with the current audience in mind. Authors who write books geared towards delta males will do increasingly well as the reputation of such publishing houses increases among the delta's.

The other target should be geared towards training gammas and fat women how to improve themselves. This is a bit more delicate and time consuming. The former is working with people who are already there. To use the medium to train broken gammas and fat sluts, is a different beast entirely, because they are psychologically damaged people. Not necessarily evil, but severely damaged and with tremendous anger.

The requires telling a "good story", but also telling it in such a way as to allow these damaged people to assess their own flaws in a way that is non-threatening. Allowing them to gain insight and courage as well as practical information on how to interact socially.

For example, the gamma male who obsessively avoids any sort of physical sport because he both cannot handle failure and has no real social skills, must be made to see a villain and hero version of himself. The version that refuses to act with courage is the villain and the effects and tragedy of that character must be made clear. The hero must be walked through the pain filled process of constant exposure to the pain of failure, of learning, of making mistakes, etc.

In this sense, Theodore Beale the author can do more good than most other authors. As he notes repeatedly, he is no John Wright, but we don't need more than one John Wright. What Mr. Beale can provide is a guide for broken gammas and wrecked fat sluts on how to face their horrors and overcome them.

Authors can of course leave the gammas and wrecked fat sluts to their own destruction, lord knows they are ugly and have it coming. But if no one takes up this task, it will be the John Scalzis and George Martins who will collect those castoffs.

A lot of the gammas hate Tolkien, Lewis, and the rest because those guys understood what evil was and were, well, men.

Or put it another way: the SJW/Left is the Orc, and the Orcs are evil in Tolkien's works. They're self-aware enough for this.

And the Left's takeover of fantasy, as many of you have written here, is pretty simple. We use it for entertainment as well as tales of historic-ish based events. LOTR, for example, is based on some historical events/epochs while also using a fantasy realm to show the nature of evil - and all without allegory!

The SJW, being a simpleton at best, uses fantasy as allegory and escape. In Rothnarok'adur, they are no longer an overweight feminist with boils and an attitude problem - they are Queen Lilith, destined for greatness! All without working for it!

"Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank,..."He does understand that this comparison is horrible, right? Habaneros, honey, cinnamon, cloves, just about all of these things are features of reality, and can probably be bought or sampled at that strip mall in Burbank. It's sad to see a naturalist's fantasy actually consists of natural materials. The true visionaries are able to see the myth,magic, or fantasy in the ordinary, lying just under it's surface. To quote the underrated Don Chaffer, "I've seen the cosmos in a woman's smile, tasted eternity in wine." The shadow (material reality) always indicates the form of the true object (myth/fantasy)

@28 The BSG reboot was a travesty. Moore is horrible at plotting as well as SJW'ing the series. He had the opportunity to actually handle religion in a SF series and showed the skill of the village atheist. Plus, characters acted like people in a normal situation and not people on the brink of extinction. Yes, we're down to 10K people and we'll keep women in combat roles. AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!

a) the books are better, but yeah, SJW checkboxes everywhere, especially after the first book. Though not quite as blatantly obvious as the TV version

b) Unlike GoT I could actually finish more than one book.

c) I think Holden was supposed to be the naive chump - and while we're at it several of his interactions with Naomi, etc. ring gamma more than true, but got away from the authors as the "big damn hero" that people grudgingly respect even as they cynically deride him as an idealist, a fool, etc.

#44 I think Tolkien and Lewis both regarded fantasy or "Myth" as they called it to be much more closely tied to reality than any Pink SF author this day does. Pink SF starts with the presupposition of Materialism, and thus doesn't reach nearly as far as Tolkien and Jack did.

@13 Not all horror films are torture porn or even necessarily gory. Some, especially those of the "Haunting of Hill House" type offer entertainment without depravity. Also, some, especially, The Last Exorcism, can feature thought provoking questions of Faith and redemption.

This idea of fantasy and science fiction being escapism for social losers was something I always believed to be true. And I don't think it was necessarily always losers, but all types of imaginative misfits, from the super smart to the emotionally incontinent. As long as the world portrayed was rich and detailed, yet vague enough to allow for personal fantasy, with a good story featuring well defined characters, it would appeal to a mostly obsessive male audience looking for escape.

And I hadn't realised until I discovered Vox how much SF and fantasy has been suffused with contemporary politics i.e. converged. Before politics was either incidental or just part of the tapestry. Star Trek might have been heavily left leaning, but it was (for the most part) an internally consistent world, possessed a genuine and engaging vision and mostly had good storytelling (I suppose that's what made it effective propaganda). The Wheel of Time was dripping with feminism, but maybe Robert Jordan could only portray women as domineering harpies.

And on the other hand, I remember reading a long essay years ago about the history of SF arguing that even though it had always appealed to leftists, as it depicted the future and progress, sometimes in bright colourful terms, most of the authors like Heinlein, Scott Card et al were probably "gasp" right-wing! So politics really wasn't really the main thrust or that explicit.

(I just dug it up again, for anyone who's interested:http://www.graspingforthewind.com/2011/04/27/guest-post-is-science-fiction-right-wing-by-henry-baum/)

Well there's no doubt anymore which side of the aisle SF and fantasy is on now or what its goals are. And I don't think the shallow inconsistencies and insanity of today's left-wing thinking lends itself to attractive world building. But then this is convergence and that doesn't matter at all...

"Mathematics education doesn't help engineers or computer scientists plug and chug in their occupations, it CHANNELS THEIR MINDS at a critical point in development."

I was out to dinner with some some friends and one asked another, who is a professor of Chemistry, "I've been wondering, why do you make pre-med students take Organic Chemeisty? Is it something that are really going to need in actual practice?"

The prof answered, "No, there isn't really any of the chemistry that they'll need to know, but we aren't really teaching the med students chemistry. We're teaching them the logical process of a diagnosis."

But GotG2 takes superheroic feelings expulsion to a new absurd peak. The movie’s honorable desire to make sure each of its many characters gets his or her own emotional showcase makes the film’s second half feel at times like a group therapy session interspersed with laser battles. What I want from the Guardians of the Galaxy is not for them to explain that they love each other but to show that they love each other by supporting each other in battle, by backing each other up, by cracking wise or busting chops.

"Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?"

IMHO the only sci-fi (that I'm familiar with, I've always preferred TV/film) that could honestly be called ''right/conservative'' (and not hostile to religion) was Babylon 5.The Star Trek 'universe' has always been 'liberal', in that the Federation by sci-fi 'handwaving' managed to bypass physical reality. Not to mention the ''multiculturalism'' inherent since it's inception.At least they usually did the stories well.

So to Rape Rape, reality is the squalor of naturally dead places, and nature is fantasy? Despite all his money, his horizon on the world is limited to a ritza fritzin Newark parking garage? Despite having ten zillion times more money than I will ever have, he's never heard a lion roaring in the darkness of the African bush? He's never stood on the shores of the Great Lakes with the smell of pines in the air and watched the waves rolling in white thunder onto the sand under the moon? Never stood on the tower rooftop of Charles Bridge in Prague in the rain, looking out over the Vltava and the multi-colored rooftops, above the place where in 1648 the blasts of musketry were so fierce that they peeled away the ancient armorial achievements and Gothic decorations carved in stone, and sensed the flow of centuries, of composers and emperors, of poets and thinkers and rebels and soldiers, who have passed through that place?

How can a man with no appreciation for the grandeur and beauty of reality write fantasy/myth, infused with the grandeur and beauty of eternal principles of courage, sacrifice, hope, despair, loyalty, treachery, nobility...?

"Any group that includes Asimov, Blish, Pohl, Kornbluth and Knight can boast of every SF writing award given before the turn of the century."

I'm not entirely sure what to say to this, other than "awards matter why?" I thought the last five years proved just how irrelevant awards are for either quality or popularity.

Even actual leftists like Rowling can't write lefty fiction. Hell, Martin can't even do it. If I didn't know who he was, my takeaway from book 1 would be "power-grubbing, amoral, urban elites and taxation destroy peaceful and prosperous country".

A big factor is the overwhelming leftist tilt of humanities and liberal arts programs churning out far more prospective fiction writers than the market can support. These grads - credentialed and molded by lefty professors - have to earn means of paying off substantial education debt, and fantasy frontier is too tempting a territory for many writers to resist some homesteading, even if looked down upon a bit by their peers.

Editors are the gate-keepers. Editors, right now, are women from women's colleges with sjw professors. Even if a writer sank time into writing a conventional, even middle of the road, science fiction book, if they are conventionally published by a regular house, their work is never going to be in print.

Writers say this: they want to write this way. Readers say they want books this way. In between the two of them stand editors. Editors want social engineering projects.

@56 JMS gave religion a fair shake in Babylon5. Considering he was an atheist, that was quite an achievement.

@57 Firefly wasn't conservative. You could see the Whedon-esque lefty tropes through the 13 episodes. Girl who could whip big guys (training doesn't fix physics). Religious people are evil. Book isn't religious. He's just comic spiritual. If I remember correctly, the show runners were shocked that people liked Jayne. We had the brave and independent hookers. Had the show lasted longer, it would have gotten worse.

Interestingly I think DS9 had some moments. It's true they made Nurse Ratchett into the boring hypocritical traditionalist fundamentalist villain, and hedged on whether religion is just space science or something beyond that, but Sisko constantly had to argue the merits of Bajoran beliefs against the Billy Nye-esque Starfleet apparatchiks.

@Chris Lutz - The hilarious thing is that Whedon's best characters and stories are consistently those that are most opposite from his professed beliefs. It's as though he can't help but reveal the truth whenever he writes, even though he hates it. Buy the man a donkey and call him Balaam.

"One explanation is that progressives tend to gravitate toward fantasy because of the similarities between the idealism found throughout much of the genre and the progressive notion of progress and the perfectibility of humanity."

Then why all leftist fantasy is invariably, invariably depressing, spends most of its time in proverbial or literal gutter, and comes to conclusion that people actually are pieces of shit?

I mean, not even going for low-hanging fruit, does the fact that even Terry Pratchett was unable to articulate how exactly Sam Vimes is arriving to different conclusions than Carcer, except that the books need a good guy, tell you something?

60. S1AL May 09, 2017 12:08 PMI'm not entirely sure what to say to this, other than "awards matter why?"

because, back then, they actually WERE a proxy for popularity.

and your assertion was that 'popular authors' weren't Left Wing.

well, they don't get more popular than Asimov and Pohl. and Asimov and Pohl belonged to a communist front group. in the 1940s.

and Heinlein, don't forget, was a card carrying Socialist in California. you might assert that he backslid into a more reactionary pose by the time he started getting published ... but then, 'Stranger in a Strange Land'.

that's two of The Big Three skiffy authors following overtly Marxist ideologies.

DS9 subverted Roddenberry's vision of the Federation as a humanist utopia enough that, while I wouldn't call it "conservative," it was far more reality-based. Staying in one place helped, because they couldn't fly on and miss out on the consequences of their actions each week. It also managed to have a black commander/captain for 7 years while only producing 1-2 episodes that drew any attention to that fact at all. While it never flat out said any religion was real -- it's still Star Trek -- it had quite a few episodes that were respectful of one religion or another. Very different from TNG's "Who Watches the Watchers," a favorite of atheists in which Picard gives an impassioned "There is no god" speech and claims humanity left religion behind in the "dark ages."

Heinlein also wrote Starship Troopers, a blatantly pro-Praetorian novel.

If you're going to talk about the Futurians, you also have to talk about all the right-wing people of the time... which includes Lewis and Tolkien. Hell, Burroughs? Howard? Hardly a bunch of communists.

ToBs... I watched season 1 through season 4, trying to decide if it was worth reading the book behind it. I got tired of Martin's series as the heroic characters were all stupidly letting themselves get murdered by the lowlifes. None of the decent characters had a bit of Machiavelli or Sun Tzu in them. I called BS to myself and stopped watching.

Rape, Rape's fantasies are just another form of SJW ant-West crap. Just my take, I did not go back to analyses fairly, as I decided to be done with him.

Re: "What I want from the Guardians of the Galaxy is not for them to explain that they love each other but to show that they love each other by supporting each other in battle, by backing each other up, by cracking wise or busting chops."

Sounds like they made the rookie writer mistake of telling not showing - which is always more work, a lot more work.

Funny thing, I remember a comment thread on here a while ago and someone mentioned that police who investigate child molesters notice molesters have a huge affinity for Star Trek. It's not surprising that sexual deviants and other misfits would choose to live in fantasy where reality bends to their preferences

@15 What will happen is that these practices will lead to a greater differentiation between intellectual elites (those who got proper schooling) and the rest, instead of greater democratization. There will be universities and "universities".

haus frau wrote:Funny thing, I remember a comment thread on here a while ago and someone mentioned that police who investigate child molesters notice molesters have a huge affinity for Star Trek. It's not surprising that sexual deviants and other misfits would choose to live in fantasy where reality bends to their preferences

Yep, that must be the key. Everyone who enjoys fantasy or sci-fi is an evil, degenerate freak.

@81 don't be an ass. Saying there are specific reasons sci-fi attracts a certain crowd in not the same as saying everyone interested in sci-fi is a pedo. Don't try tell me Rape-Rape Martin isn't at least partly into fantasy as a conduit to indulge in deviant sexual fantasy.

Do you know what else appeals to fat women and gamma males? Gnosticism. To them, the world looks intrinsically hostile and disordered, and the paranoid gnostical worldview they cling to assures them that their lack of concord with the rest of society is not due to their intrinsic alienation, but rather, due to heartlessness of others.

It then gives them purpose: to remake the world to suit them, while claiming it will be a paradise. In such a world, they upend and redefine the virtues to make their dysfunctions meritorious. Then, if possible, they exact revenge upon the normies of the world in punishment for their own flaws.

At the heart of it, Gnosticism appeals to those whose pride will not allow them to look honestly at their shortcomings, moral or otherwise. Such people never set about the hard work of improving themselves where possible, never accept their trials as salutary, and are never contrite and seek forgiveness for their sins.

In SF/F, this type of loser is able to retreat to a fantasy world, but for those clever enough they can unleash a more diabolical, weaponized gnosticism that spawns murderous mass movements that can potentially kill millions (as did Communism, Nazism, Positivism, etc).

This is why the alt-right is so important. They seem to be the only ones who are fighting to keep these losers in check.

Yes, I guess I can see that. The Star Trek universe has always seemed like a singularly unsatisfying cipher; it's kind of SJW-ish carried to the point of making everyone into a sort of indistinguishable gray paste. And it has always seemed quite sexless and sterile as well.

So there may indeed be something there that would appeal to the oddballs. It's always been highly unappealing for some reason that I can't put my finger on; I'm no fan of Star Wars, but even the worst of the prequels seem to have more juice and life than dead, bland repression of that damn Federation.

progressives tend to gravitate toward fantasy because of the similarities between the idealism found throughout much of the genre and the progressive notion of progress and the perfectibility of humanity.

No, they gravitate towards it because they are amoral nihilists, and amoral nihilism is found throughout the genre.

George R.R. Martin sums up the meaning of fantasy in this sense very nicely on his blog, noting that fantasy is “written in the language of dreams”

The language of rape fantasies, you mean. Though I have no doubt most if not all of GRRMs dreams involve rape.

Oh, I don't think it's an experiment -- I think it's a finely honed plan/system, the effects of which they already KNEW would result in an intellectually stunted worker-bee class. They couldn't possibly be running this as an experiment -- cause it's effective beyond practice, and ubiquitous across our race (especially).

Interestingly I think DS9 had some moments. It's true they made Nurse Ratchett into the boring hypocritical traditionalist fundamentalist villain, and hedged on whether religion is just space science or something beyond that, but Sisko constantly had to argue the merits of Bajoran beliefs against the Billy Nye-esque Starfleet apparatchiks.That was a point about DS9, to the Bajorans, Sisko was ''Jesus''. Because of his (atheist) Starfleet training, he couldn't accept that - until, at the end, he had no choice but to accept that he was.

Another possible explaination, perhaps SF/F is left leaning because the left has made a special effort to make it so. Why, because the left is entirely utopian, and that is a dream.

Fantasy can portray the truth sometimes better than reality can, the reality of good and evil and beauty and ugliness, and the fight between them. It shows us our dreams, dreams of that better life that can await us. This must not be allowed, you are required to believe that this is all there is, and your only hope for anything lies with setting up that utopian society here and now that only we can give you.

Science fiction is about the future, looking forward and asking "what if". We do not want you looking forward, you might ask questions we do not want asked. We have already destroyed the past, we will now destroy the future, and then you will look to us, for that will be the only dream you have left.

Only we will control your dreams, for we also have a dream. We dream of a boot smashing down on a human face forever.

DS9 subverted Roddenberry's vision of the Federation as a humanist utopia enough that, while I wouldn't call it "conservative," it was far more reality-based. Staying in one place helped, because they couldn't fly on and miss out on the consequences of their actions each week. It also managed to have a black commander/captain for 7 years while only producing 1-2 episodes that drew any attention to that fact at all. While it never flat out said any religion was real -- it's still Star Trek -- it had quite a few episodes that were respectful of one religion or another. Very different from TNG's "Who Watches the Watchers," a favorite of atheists in which Picard gives an impassioned "There is no god" speech and claims humanity left religion behind in the "dark ages."Exactly. At the beginning of the DS9 saga, Sisko was as atheist/agnostic as anyone else of the Federation.As time went on, he went from very uncomfortable with the Bajorans ''quaint customs'' (sort of like we see Amish) to accepting them to understanding that he was indeed the 'Jesus' of the story. Towards the end it is revealed that he is indeed ''the child of the Prophets (God(s))'' - Jesus as a metaphor does fit.Another thing I liked about it was that it didn't disrespect women.Major Kira never saw herself as 'a warrior', she didn't like being one, but if things came down to it, she did what she needed to do. She wasn't a 'superwoman', but when necessary, she ''stepped up to the plate'' and did the best she could (in a 'vice presidential' sense).{Yes, I'm aware of the ''Dax'' character(s), but in her female form she always took it that way, support, take charge if it's necessary}

Gratifying to see that my name checking of our host in the combox of that piece prompted a tweet.

@4 "amcon cucks" lol. Uncle Pat and the boys at American Conservative were defending nationalism when you were just a twinkle in your daddy's eye. "Marxism Of The Right", published in 2005, is especially instructive in view of the latter day abandonment of libertarianism by VD.

Tipsy wrote:It then gives them purpose: to remake the world to suit them, while claiming it will be a paradise. In such a world, they upend and redefine the virtues to make their dysfunctions meritorious. Then, if possible, they exact revenge upon the normies of the world in punishment for their own flaws.

Minor quibble: I love my normals and would like to find an even better term for them if possible.

I have a simpler explanation. It used to be about men using their brains to solve dangerous problems - Heinlein, Niven and so on. Knowledge of science used as a tool or weapon in what is essentially a masculine adventure novel. Once actual scientific or technological problem-solving got replaced by fantasy escapism, and that happened as early as 1977, Star Wars, it was inevitable that the loser demographic would move in. There is no piece of actual science and no problem solved with engineering in that shit space opera series. Compare Niven's Neutron Star where knowledge of physics saves the life of an astronaut with Star Wars. Luke or Han never do anything like that. Already in 1977, it was meant for an entirely different, and much mor of a loser demographics.